im gonna give you guys my bad takes which i might find myself reforming in the future
i don't think calling someone retarded is any more offensive than calling someone stupid, the reason people find it offensive now is because it's been colloquially used to describe people with physical handicaps, not necessarily mentally handicapped people finding it offensive. My cousin who I love very much was choked by the umbilical cord in the womb and is a very smart dude given his situation, when I say retarded I don't even think of someone like him I would call someone retarded in the exact same fashion I'd call someone stupid.
I also feel like my simple presence in the community might have inspired people a bit to start saying schizo as a word to make fun of people. Schizophrenia is a degenerative brain disease that is torturous and unimaginably hard to deal with to someone who isn't experiencing it, and people use the inappropriate shortening of the clinical name in the same context you'd call someone a tranny or a black instead of a transgender person or black person. It doesn't bother me that much now since I hear it every day but that's just me becoming inevitably desensitized to it.
to my knowledge autism is a term we use to describe a set of characteristics someone exhibits even in a diagnosis process, not like a disorder or disease attributed to genetics in the same way as other things, so I don't think saying that one is AS bad I guess?
I saw an extremely old clip of me as a 15 yr old saying my teammate was r***ing someone as a comm. I wouldn't even think about saying that for a split second nowadays. For whatever reason a LOT of people did that back in the day and I feel like pretty much everyone understands now that it's fucked up to say that.
and I think it's ok for people to say words that refer to their own minority in certain contexts, nobody should be telling a black person they cant say the n word. It is legitimately rare for someone to be bigoted towards their own minority when they say something like that
bear when you and other people kept telling me to kill myself a long time ago that was a time in my life where i had already tried to multiple times and even after it was said from yall. I wouldn't kill myself now and have also become desensitized to people saying it personally so it doesn't bother me in the slightest nowadays, but I'm lucky to not have permanently fucked up my body from the attempts. Think about who might be on the receiving end of things when you say something.
idk just be nice to each other LOL